Houdini 2 focuses on enhancing the user experience and analysis capabilities of the engine, while providing a useful improvement in strength.

At the time of writing Houdini leads all the major Computer Chess rating lists and is widely considered to be the strongest chess engine on the planet. From numerous interviews it appears that many top Grand Masters including the current chess World Champion Viswanathan Anand use and appreciate Houdini.

The Chess Club Live Facebook page phrased it like this: "If there ever was a computer descendant of the romantic players like Morphy, Anderssen, Spielmann, Marshall, Bogojulbow, Tal, Nezhmetdinov, Shirov, Morozevich it would be Houdini. Houdini is the current World number 1 chess engine and plays in a very romantic style."

System Requirements: Houdini is written for Windows and will run on any not too ancient Windows version, 32-bit or 64-bit. On Linux you can run Houdini using Wine without any significant performance loss.

A list of new features and improvements in Houdini 2:

Improved Analysis support

Save Hash to File, Load Hash from File, Never Clear Hash
The complete hash table can be saved to a disk file and reloaded later for continuing the analysis.

Houdini 2 makes better use of the data in the hash table to restart instantly the analysis at the point where it was previously interrupted. By saving the hash table in a disk file you can interrupt the analysis anytime. At a later date you can reload the hash table file in memory to continue the analysis as if no interruption had happened.

The new "Never Clear Hash" option will keep the hash data in memory even when the position changes or when starting a new game.

Position Learning

The "Position Learning" mode will automatically save analysis results in a learning database that will be reused in future analysis. This is a more convenient, but less powerful method of using previous analysis results than the manual Save Hash/Load Hash operations of the previous point.

To speed up solving deep mates, you can fix a limit on the search depth during the mate search.

Houdini Pro version for high-end users with powerful hardware

For advanced servers with many cores on multiple sockets (usually with so-called NUMA architecture), a special Houdini Pro version is available. It significantly improves the scaling of Houdini up to 32 cores and makes use of up to 32 GB of hash memory.